The Fields Beneath

by Gillian Tindall

  In 1855 the Local Management of the Metropolis Act changed matters considerably, even if it did not put an end to endemic wrangles between those responsible for levying money and those responsible for spending it, or to running complaints about the state of the workhouse, whose surroundings (Agar Town and St Pancras Cemetery) had become very insalubrious. By the time of the Act the internal affairs of St Pancras parish were so disorganised that special mention of it as a notorious case was made in Parliament by Sir Benjamin Hall, who drafted the Act, which paved the way – to use the metaphor that seems apt – for a lot of physical tidying up in Kentish Town. The sixteen inefficient local paving boards were superseded. Regular strings of gas lamps began to replace the old, intermittent naphtha flares along the main streets; a lot more sewers got laid – so much so that when, some ten years later, it was revealed at a vestry meeting that the parish had not actually got the power to prevent a builder building houses without drainage, at least one vestryman was surprised to hear it. (The road in question was Chester Road, off York Rise, part of the northern end of the district then rapidly developing and filling up with railway porters, drivers, ticket collectors and their families.) But old-style corruption did not disappear just like that. Instructive is a newspaper report of a Ratepayers’ Association Meeting which took place in September 1867:

  In reference to the erection of district relieving offices, the proposal with regard to paying 17s. 6d. per foot frontage for building ground in Mansfield Place, Kentish Town [now Holmes Road], was very warmly discussed; the price was considered exorbitant, and fault was found with Mr Joseph Salter for pushing the matter so strenuously in the Vestry, he being the agent for the estate. It had been said that the landlord demanded a higher price on account of the depreciation of the adjoining property by the proposed erections; but this was a very poor reason for asking so high a sum: there was already on the site a public house, a railway and a manufacturey, and the neighbourhood was about the lowest in all Kentish Town.

  This Joseph Salter was a significant figure in the area for many years – one of those Thomas Rhodes-like characters with a finger in every local pie. Only, as Rhodes typified his own generation by being a farmer-turned-builder, Salter typified his by being an insurance office agent, auctioneer, rent-collector and ultimately estate agent with a special line in valuations for railway compensation. He set up shop in New Chapel Place in 1854, just as the building explosion in Kentish Town was really getting under way: a few years later, as his family rapidly expanded, he moved his business premises up the street to Holmes Place, which later became 311 Kentish Town Road. The business remained there, as ‘Salter Rex’, till 1975, when new offices were built nearby. It is still the chief estate agent in Kentish Town.

  Joseph Salter was at various times auditor to the vestry, Chairman of the Board of Works (he opposed the Metropolitan Improvement Rate in 1866) and a Poor Law Commissioner who was re-elected as a Guardian when the Gaythorne-Hardy Act of 1867 finally severed the long and acrimonious partnership of the Poor Law administrators and the vestry. Another Salter, Jonathan, whom I believe to have been Joseph’s brother and owner of a prosperous drapers in Camden Town, was similarly a vestryman and a Poor Law Guardian and was eventually presented with a gold watch in return for fifty years service. (A fact which gives pause for thought, when you consider the vicissitudes both vestry and Poor Law had gone through in that period.) Jonathan Salter’s attitude to his duties can best be summed up by the fact that, when the matter of distributing new clothing to children in the workhouse came up, he ‘wished the new style of clothing to be given to the best conducted children’. Joseph, however, as a father of twelve, seems to have been of a rather more charitable turn of mind, provided his own interests were not at stake: it was his suggestion that, at Christmas 1867, ‘some small toys should be supplied to the [workhouse] children … the Master was authorised to expend £2 in their purchase.’ At all events he had inspired sufficient respect and gratitude by the time he died in 1876 to have a granite fountain and drinking trough erected in his memory at the corner of College Gardens – a scrap of green space at the junction of Royal College Street and St Pancras Way, which the vestry had earlier managed to preserve from being turned into roadway.

  The horses for whom the drinking trough was a kindly thought have long vanished, except for the occasional scrap-iron dealer’s cart, and the trough is dry, but the fountain still works on one side and is an amenity for the drunks, tramps and other isolated misfits sometimes to be seen in the gardens, sheltering under the reverberating railway bridge that spans it.

  * It rather looks, from the newspaper reports of Pike’s law suit, as if at this period he unsuccessfully attempted to get the Midland Railway to include his little plot within their plan, and that this was yet another bone of contention with his neighbours.

  † One of these, the Wesleyan Methodist church by Tarring in Lady Margaret Road (1865) has recently re-populated itself by becoming an RC church. What would the original congregation say?

  10

  With Gas and Attendance

  I have in my possession a little book, dated 1864 and sold then for one shilling, entitled How I Managed My House on £200 a Year. At an early point in this minutely detailed account we have the archetypal Victorian clerk, and paterfamilias in prospect, telling his wife that he has found a house for them in an expanding suburb ‘near Islington’:

  The house at thirty pounds, which stands in the open space of garden ground, close to the field of forty acres, will be just the thing for us. I should think it would be some years before the now pretty view can be built out. It is only three miles from London, perhaps a little more to the office, but that does not signify. The house is just the one for us; I mean the finished one of the four houses near to the church which is in progress. We shall have no neighbours yet, and I have observed very common people do not live in semi-detached houses; they like to congregate near a market, and so ought we, as a matter of economy, but I think fresh air better than very cheap food. So, little wife, it is settled …

  It is instructive to compare this, and the description that follows of their removal to this new, exciting, remote spot, with the description in George Grossmith’s Diary of a Nobody of the Pooters moving into what might be precisely the same house, thirty years later:

  My dear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house, ‘The Laurels’, Brickfield Terrace, Holloway – a nice, six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour. We have a little front garden; and there is a flight of ten steps up to the front door, which, by the by, we keep locked with the chain up … We have a nice little back garden which runs down to the railway. We were rather afraid of the noise of the trains at first, but the landlord said we should not notice them after a bit and took £2 off the bill. He was certainly right, and beyond the cracking of the garden wall at the bottom, we have suffered no inconvenience.

  It is interesting that, despite the impeccable respectability of the Pooters (Mr Pooter is a senior clerk in the firm where he had been for the last twenty years) there is a slight implication of social decline where the house is concerned. It was not, obviously, intended by the builder that the inhabitants should leave the front door locked all the time and come and go ‘to the little side entrance, which saves the servant the trouble of going up to the front door, thereby taking from her work’. Moreover the possession of only one servant (two was then the upper-middle-class norm) is an indication intended to place the Pooters irrevocably in a certain category. The nature of life in the inner suburbs was by then recognised by everyone; it was fossilising into a joke, and George Grossmith, Pooter’s creator, was one of those who helped to crystallise it. He was born and grew up in the Camden – Kentish Town area: he knew all about that sort of life. There is even a subtle innuendo in the address ‘Brickfield Terrace, Holloway’. Most of Holloway proper, like Tufnell Park, was not laid out till the late Victorian era, but Weedon Grossmith’s illustra
tion clearly shows a house of the late 1850s or 1860s. The point is that, by the end of the century, the practice was in vogue of euphemising an address in barely-respectable Kentish Town as ‘Holloway’, ‘North St Pancras’ or ‘Highgate Rise’. For Kentish Town had lost, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the battle to remain a desirable area. Palmer, writing in 1870, remarked ‘the green fields … have passed away, and lines of streets connect it with the Holloway Road’. Less than twenty years later, the London Argus was uncompromisingly damning about the place: ‘The district today has not much to recommend it. It is one of those shabby, prosaic, monotonous residential quarters that could well be spared from the Metropolis.’

  People were to go on saying that, in various ways, for the next sixty years. The era of ‘slum clearance’ was as yet only on the horizon but was in sight – that middle-class and bureaucratic obsession with destroying the habitat of people who have no say in the matter, in the name of progress, morality and a Brave New World. A curious idea seems to have got about, which is still to be found today, that the evils of what was coming to be called ‘suburban sprawl’ can be considered in isolation from the needs of the population which have created the sprawl in the first place. William Morris spoke of the growth of London as a ‘spreading sore … swallowing up in its loathsomeness field and wood and heath without mercy and without hope’. In fact, of course, Kentish Town like most of the other old suburbs couldn’t possibly be ‘spared from the Metropolis’ because, apart from anything else, very large numbers of people lived in these areas. In 1881 the population of St Pancras reached its highest level ever – 236,258 (it has been decreasing slightly but steadily ever since). The number of houses, however, was more or less the same – under 26,000 – as it had been ten years earlier, when the population was 15,000 fewer. So evidently the overcrowding had become slightly worse. Most of the worse-crowded areas were not in Kentish Town itself, except for a few pockets in west Kentish Town, but it is clear that a lot of houses by then even in the relatively ‘nicer’ streets, were already in multi-occupation, and most remained so from then on.

  Lodgers were very much a feature of Victorian and Edwardian life in both the working classes and the lower-middle class, though sometimes in the latter a polite pretence was maintained, for the landlord and the neighbours, that the outsider was a friend visiting. Indeed couples just setting up together commonly rented a house bigger than they needed, intending to balance their budget by installing some docile sub-tenant in the ‘first floor front’ or the ‘third floor back’. The song of the period, Our Lodger’s Such a Nice Young Man, presents the archetypal one, a young man come to London to work, of slightly higher social class than his landlord and landlady and on occasions a source of violent marital upheaval. It will be noted that Gowing, Mr Pooter’s rather more knowing friend, is a lodger in someone else’s house. But frequently couples or even whole families took what were called ‘apartments’ in someone else’s house; local newspapers of the late nineteenth century are full of advertisements for these at 20 words for 6d. – ‘Apartments, furnished – Drawing and Bedroom or Bedroom with use of Parlour, with or without Board’, ‘To Let, a Drawing Room floor of Three or Four Rooms. Gas if required. Use of kitchen.’ A frequent phrase is ‘With gas and attendance’; presumably these had by then become the recognised signs of a civilised existence. Occasionally when advertising for ‘a General Servant’ a prospective employer would stress the fact that lodgers were not kept, which gives one a certain insight into the life led by a general servant in houses where lodgers were a feature. Other landladies seem simply to want a tenant who would be as little trouble as possible: ‘Unfurnished room – first floor – suitable for a widow, or single person without occupation.’

  That advertisement strikes a chill to the heart. Why the person offering the room should prefer an occupationless lone person to one who had at least a job to go to to dilute the absolute solitude and monotony of his or her life, it is hard to see. Presumably the advertisement is saying in code that a lodger of some modest means and therefore gentility is wanted rather than a ‘shop girl’. One recalls General William Booth’s passionate remarks on the subject:

  In London at the present moment how many hundreds, nay thousands, of young men and young women, who are living in lodgings, are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of anyone of the other sex! The street is no doubt the city substitute for the village green, and what a substitute it is!

  It has been bitterly said by one who knew well what he was talking about ‘There are thousands of young men today who have no right to call any woman by her Christian name, except the girls they meet plying their dreadful trade in our public thoroughfares.’ As long as that is the case, vice has an enormous advantage over virtue; such an abnormal social arrangement interdicts morality and places a vast premium upon prostitution. We must get back to nature if we have to cope with this ghastly evil. (In Darkest London, 1890)

  General Booth approaches the subject from a different angle to that usually adopted by twentieth-century commentators, but in essence the diagnosis of the ‘lonely bed-sitter syndrome’ is the same. This remained a significant element in the life of the inner suburbs throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and is only dying out now under pressure of cumulative social change, greatly increased council ownership of property, and the unfortunate effects of several well-intentioned Rent Acts, which have turned the renting of rooms into a complex legal situation which erstwhile landlords and landladies are afraid to enter.

  It is to be hoped that as the nineteenth century drew towards its close, and a mild emancipation of women began to create for the first time a host of female office workers living in something like independence and travelling about on the new Metropolitan Railway and the ‘Twopenny Tube’,* it was possible for people in places like Kentish Town to find company elsewhere than on the street. Bicycling clubs flourished in the 1890s; with the chances they offered for informal, unchaperoned but essentially respectable and healthy trips to the neighbouring countryside, they were a considerable force for social liberation. Pooter’s friends Gowing and Cummings are both eager subscribers to the Bicycle News. Lupin, Pooter’s unsatisfactory son, does not go in for anything quite so energetic, but prefers the opportunities for making new acquaintances offered by amateur theatricals: he is a leading light of the ‘Holloway Comedians’, and it was there that he met Daisy Mutlar who, without being (of course) a Bad Girl, is the prototype of the ‘fast young lady’ of the period.

  Even Lupin, for all his tiresome behaviour, his slang and his over-high collars, subscribes basically to exactly the same set of social rules as his quintessentially respectable father. Lupin associates with City types who give him dubious tips about shares, but never with members of the working class, not even servant girls. The Pooters’ one servant, Sarah, seems to be young, and inevitably lives, in such a small house, at close quarters with her master and mistress: Pooter actually comes upstairs and paints her wash-stand and towel horse bright red for her, for which she is unaccountably ungrateful, but it never seems to enter anyone’s mind that she might be seen as a conceivable object for Lupin’s free-floating desires. By the same token Sarah, no doubt, kept herself to herself and would not have dreamed of paying attention to the grocer’s boy, who only appears as a dishevelled figure picking the paint blisters off the back door. He would have come (say) from Harmood Street or Inkerman Street, while the Pooters lived in (say) Leighton Road or Islip Street, near but on the opposite side of the district. From Harmood Street and its purlieus too would have come the little step girls who, in respectable streets, came and scrubbed the front doorsteps for housewives like the unfortunate Mrs Pike, who were too poor to employ a servant but too conscious of their precariously maintained status to want to be seen cleaning the step themselves. Frederick Willis, who in old age wrote A Book of London Yesterdays about his own youth, delineates the social hierarchy in such districts
with precision:

  The step girl was a child of about ten or eleven, progeny of the poorest section of local society, and free from the terrifying restraints of class consciousness … This child, member of a class similar to the Untouchables of India, provided her own apron (an old sack torn in half) and for a few coppers removed the fear of social ostracism from the housewife … The young servant girls were, of course, members of a higher grade of society, and they had to maintain their dignity when dealing with the untouchables, but when they went out with the Lady of the House on a shopping expedition, which frequently happened, they always walked at a respectful distance in the rear, carrying a large shopping bag. Meanwhile, no doubt, their mistress’s husband was grovelling at the feet of a wholesale draper in St Paul’s Churchyard. Thus society was kept in its proper station all along the line.